UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, October 27, 02008

Go ahead, hug an audiovisual curator, archivist or librarian who's caring for our precious audiovisual heritage. On October 27, 02008, it will once again be UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, activities for which are being promoted by the Co-ordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations. This year's theme is "The Audiovisual Heritage as a Witness of Cultural Diversity."

Dickinson College and Millersville University digital project, "Slavery & Abolition in the U.S.: Select Publications of the 1800s"

Congratulations to Dickinson College and Millersville University on opening this important digital collection to the Internet community:

"Slavery & Abolition in the U.S.: Select Publications of the 1800" is a digital collection of books and pamphlets that demonstrate the varying ideas and beliefs about slavery in the United States as expressed by Americans throughout the nineteenth century. The works in this collection reflect arguments on both sides of the slavery debate and include first person narratives, legal proceedings and decisions, anti-slavery tracts, religious sermons, and early secondary works. The 77 titles in the collection represent the works of over 70 authors and/or organizations, published between 1787 and 1911. The publications are all drawn from the holdings of Millersville University Library and the Dickinson College Library, as well as each of their respective Special Collections Departments. The collection includes more than 15,000 individual pages of printed text and corresponding searchable transcriptions. This online resource is made freely available to the public, and we hope that providing these rare and important research materials will enhance teaching and learning about this complex issue at all levels of instruction.

This collaborative digitization project was supported in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in association with Millersville University and Dickinson College.

"Slavery & Abolition in the U.S." utilizes CONTENTdm to organize and present its materials online. The software makes it possible to view textual materials online, to display page images and full-text transcripts side by side, and to offer full-text searchability of the materials in the digital collection.

Source: ARCHIVES & ARCHIVISTS mailing list (02008 10 20)

Fifth PLANETS newsletter is out

From the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02008 10 22):

Planets is happy to announce that the project’s fifth newsletter is now available!

The newsletter from the Planets project includes highlights from the annual review, an introduction to Plato, as well as an article introducing a conceptual model for expressing concepts and requirements in digital preservation.

The newsletter also presents detailed lists of recent Planets publications and the project's participation in past and forthcoming events.

Finally, the fifth issue reveals a new name, Planetarium, and general makeover of the publication.

The newsletter can be read here - www.planets-project.eu/docs/newsletters/PlanetsNewsletterIssue5.pdf

The newsletter is also available on the Planets web site - www.planets-project.eu

Twine.com unspools itself to the public

Twine.com is now available and open for public signups, that is, it's now officially out of beta.

EAD@10 Symposium Proceedings

From the announcement on the ARCHIVES & ARCHIVISTS mailing list (02008 10 22):

"EAD@10" SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) and OCLC's RLG Programs sponsored a symposium in August to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Encoded Archival Description (EAD). European speakers discussed how EAD has been implemented in their countries and a group of innovative archivists presented their forward-thinking views about what the next 10 years may bring.

Merrilee Proffitt and Jackie Dooley from OCLC Research are working with panelists to make the proceedings from the day fully available for those who were unable to attend. The first stage of the proceedings -- PowerPoint presentations and audio files (in MP3 format) -- are now available online. Additional material will be available in the near future, including edited versions of the papers presented at the symposium.

Please visit http://www.archivists.org/publications/epubs/EAD@10.asp

Collected Visions, an online archive of personal photos

Collected Visions is a provocative photo site brought to my attention as something to "read" in preparation for an online discussion with a couple of photo curators and critics:

Approximately 3,000 images collected from over 300 people are in a searchable archive of family snapshots. More than 250 photo essays exploring how photographs shape our memories are posted in the CV Gallery, the CV Museum, and Positive Visions. Please contribute stories and photographs or create essays inspired by images in our archive. Launched in 1996, Collected Visions was conceived and is updated by Lorie Novak.

Source: front page of Collected Visions

Happy belated Open Access Day

The world's first Open Access Day was held on October 14, 02008. OAD was founded by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

[caption id="attachment_2510" align="alignleft" width="448" caption="Open Access Day"][/caption]

Nestor handbook on digital preservation

Germany's Nestor (Network of Expertise in Long-Term Storage of Digital Resources) published version 1.2 in June 02008 of its digital preservation handbook, Eine kleine Enzyklopädie der digitalen Langzeitarchivierung. It's only available in German and, when the project wraps up in 02009, a printed version should appear. The work is still in progress.

Source: nestor newsletter no. 15 (02008 09 15)

United States National Park Service Centennial Initiative, 1916-2016

Yes, it's true, the United States National Park Service will be 100 years old in 2016. Its NPS Centennial Initiative site will keep you up to date as you count down the years, months and days. But wait, that's like eight years away. This is unheard of in government circles, planning that far ahead. Too bad the U.S. government economic strategists couldn't foresee the catastrophe they brought on for the rest of the world.

VPSVille.ca explanation of the disappeared servers

Quoting the e-mail I and all affected customers received on October 13, 02008. I confirmed that my "hardware node" was gone. I'm posting this as a public service so anyone who's thinking of using VPSVille.ca is aware of this situation.

What Happened Here, Oct 8th.

We here at VPSVille have had a few days of frantic phone calls, hair-pulling, yelling, crying, screaming, sector-recovery crash courses and angry accusations. We've also looked closely at our logs and have pieced together what happened with our recent data loss incident.

Initially we thought it might be a case of gross negligence and some harsh words and harsher threats were exchanged, but we now believe it was just an honest, stupid mistake. Inexperience sunk the ship.

One of our new employee's made some crucial errors regarding security, and this was compounded by one of our techs travelling abroad and requiring some relaxation in our usually strict access policy. One firewall in front of another and both temporarily disabled = no firewall at all.

This unfortunately resulted in some malicious SOB with no real life to waltz into an almost unprotected segment of the network through a newly installed appliance with a default password and start deleting things. Several servers actually and a NAS unit assigned to back them up. One of the servers was our control node, which interfaces between the website and the other servers. Even our mail server was affected.

Some servers were running even after their files were deleted, through some strange quirk of Linux buffering that we still don't fully understand.

Its easy to blame a hacker of course, but we do feel that an unfortunate series of events combined to make their hack particularly easy. Far to easy for a network of this magnitude and importance to so many people.

This looked like a total loss, with no way to recover the data, so we sent out a somewhat panicked email to affected users that their accounts would just be canceled and refunded. Shortly afterwords our outgoing email died.

This resulted in a torrent of email, most of it surprising friendly, and much of it understandably angry and dismayed, telling us they wished to remain customers even if their data was not recovered.

Happily we were able to restore many servers with a sector recovery service. In light of this we have not arbitrarily canceled any accounts.

All affected accounts are re-enabled and have been credited. If we were able to restore your data we have sent you an email about it (hardware nodes rapier, cutlass and spear).

We sincerely express our condolences to affected customers for this unfortunate series of events, nobody should lose data at VPSVille, its an awful thing and we feel your pain.

Things do happen in life, but this won't happen again.

- Staff

Ten Thousand Year Blog Is Here

Due to a combination of what appears to be incompetence and a deliberate act of sabotage by a staff member at VPSVIlle.ca (Very Poor Service), they wiped out my sites, along with those of other customers, with no chance of restoration and can't even offer those affected space to rebuild. It's the latter issue that has upset me more than having to rebuild everything. So I'm now using WordPress.com as the new home for my Ten Thousand Year Blog. I will be importing the existing site's contents as best I can over the next few weeks following a writing assignment for the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Importing means having to resurrect the site on my local PC and creating a WordPress export file. Since the import function in WordPress.com doesn't appear to work as advertised -- I had a file well under the 15MB size limit -- I think I will simply close off the old Ten Thousand Year Blog and start fresh here. If you see posts and comments disappearing from time to time, that is why. 

Here is Google's cached version of the last iteration of The Ten Thousand Year Blog (June 2003-October 2008).

3rd Annual WePreserve Conference in Nice (France), October 02008

DigitalPreservationEurope, Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) and CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval) warmly invite you to you to join the:

3rd Annual WePreserve Conference in Nice (France): A New Generation of Preservation Tools and Services 28-30 October 2008

This conference presents the most recent results of CASPAR, Planets, DPE and other European Union co-funded research and development work into methods, tools and services to facilitate digital preservation and curation. During the two conference days these projects will present and give live demonstrations of the latest tools and services.

The conference will open with an evening reception poster session showcasing innovative and tangible results of our research. It will be followed by two full days of presentations, demonstrations, guest speakers and discussion panels.

Attendees will gain knowledge of the methods, tools and services they can take now to address the digital preservation challenge in their institution.

To register today or to submit a poster please visit our website: http://www.wepreserve.eu/events/nice-2008/ or contact us at: wepreserve@hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk

Source: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU, 02008 10 10